Jann is on the panel of “judges”, although they are more like witnesses, alongside Montrealer Pierre Bouvier of Simple Plan, and Robert “Vanilla Ice” Van Winkle (you know you’ve been missing him).

Here’s a taste of what she had to say to me last week at the Pantages Hotel in Toronto:

On Canada Sings [Arden playfully sings an A natural], did you want to be the mean judge with the accent?
Yeah, wouldn’t that have been easy. You know, when they made me the offer I thought, “I don’t want to do this.” But my manager said, “It’s not what you think. It’s not 100 kids that want to be flown to Vegas to be famous and get a record deal.” These are people that want to earn money for their charity. These are people that don’t typically sing and dance. These are firemen, teachers, zookeepers, truck drivers. What a cool concept! Everybody wins. Not a record contract, but a nice chunk of money for the charity of their choice. Plus, they have this experience that takes them over the course of a few weeks, working with vocal coaches and choreographers, and they get to be in the spotlight on a national TV show, singing and dancing in a production that is as good as anything I’ve seen on Broadway. And I am not kidding you; nobody sucks! Nobody!

Are you concerned one of these groups of ordinary working Canadians might do so well that they quit their day jobs and leave a hospital or something without a staff?
I would be thrilled if that happened…

Whereas Jann Arden is completely down to Earth, the subject of Getting Over the Alien Language Barrier is the contrary. I’ve taken my obsession with languages to new heights. AE the Canadian Science Fiction Review had the vision to publish what I had to say, and everyone else is part of the government coverup. It starts like this:

You never know when it’s going to happen. A flying saucer pulled off the side of the highway with the hood up, alien waving a tentacle wielding what could be a sparkplug, a cellphone or a ray gun and shouting, “Znelflgjpd knorb zlothkpmzus!” How would you respond? You’ve hit the alien language barrier. With NASA’s Kepler telescope spotting potentially habitable planets by the dozen outside our solar system, it may be time for us to start brushing up on our extraterrestrial language skills, or get ready to tutor E.T. in Earthish as a Second Language.

I lost the battle of “should we go?” but my extremely low expectations paid off!

Battle LA was not “blah”; it was kind of fun. It has all the artistic merits of a trip on a roller coaster. This is a movie you don’t want to arrive late for. Not that you’d have trouble following the plot or miss any witty dialogue. Every line was distinctly unmemorable. But it starts like a cat in a bath.

It would not make a good stage play. Well, possibly a musical.

No complaints about the capable cast (the demands of the script did not exceed their range), and I didn’t hear a yawn through the whole thing.

The story often lacked realism, and I don’t mean what Dr Seth Shostak of SETI recently said at “The Great Extraterrestrial Debate” for the Centre For Inquiry in Toronto, about aliens having better things to do than to wander way the hell out to this uninteresting part of the galaxy. He did in fact say that, if aliens do come all this way, we can expect to get the kind of treatment that indigenous populations often get when they are “discovered” by a technologically superior group.

No, the shortcomings I mean are, for lack of a better word, subtler than that. But I don’t want to spoil it for you by saying the kid takes it pretty well when his dad dies. …Oops.

At the Centre for Inquiry’s “The Great Extraterrestrial Debate” at U of T last Friday, Dr. Seth Shostak, senior astronomer at the SETI Institute (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) told us what to expect when we finally encounter E.T., which he wagers a cup of “Tim, what is it, Hortons coffee” will happen in the next few decades.

Given the billions of potentially life-supporting planets in our galaxy alone, Shostak takes it as a given that we’re not alone. But a signal traveling at the speed of light may take thousands of years each way. By the time we get word from another civilization, the senders may have been extinct for millennia.